First up, props go to PC Gamer for bringing this cool little news snippet to my attention. What am I talking about? Well, it appears that a very talented computer programmer (and fairly accomplished writer, I might add) named Will has shoehorned the Original and Arcade city maps from Crazy Taxi into the level viewing portal at noclip.website (scroll down to the 'Experimental' heading under the 'Games' list and you'll find Crazy Taxi).
Noclip is a self described 'digital museum of videogame levels,' and a quick browse around the site will reveal a host of environments and stages ripped from a wide range of games which have been uploaded in their entirety; and they're all freely explorable using the mouse to look and the keyboard to move. I remember a long time ago I wrote about a similar project for (sadly defunct) retrogaming site RetroCollect, where some genius had managed to make the circuits from WipEout fully explorable via a disembodied camera. Well, thanks to Will and his work at (the sublimely titled) wretched.computer, the same is now possible in both of the playable environments from Crazy Taxi.
The blurb over at wretched.computer goes into extreme detail as to how this sorcery was achieved, and reveals that the stages uploaded to noclip are actually from the Nintendo Gamecube port of Crazy Taxi, as opposed to the original Dreamcast port. Following the link to noclip will allow you to enter the sun drenched environs of Crazy Taxi's pseudo California-esque landscape and gawp at all those polygonal landmarks you probably only ever caught a glimpse of as you tried to deliver Father White to the eerily empty church, or the heavily pregnant Maria to Boarder's Paradise before she dropped her sprog in the back seat of Gus's cab. Or the timer ran out...whichever came first.
Interestingly, there are also fully explorable recreations of Jet Set Radio's Tokyo-To districts at noclip, which are fascinating to whizz around. Personally I'd love to see Metropolis Street Racer one day appear as a fully explorable destination, but for the time being we'll have to make do with that game's unlockable free roam mode to sample the delights hidden within.
Have you messed about with noclip's awesomeness? And which Dreamcast game environments would you like to be able to freely explore? Let us know in the comments.
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